In response to the the “Neoliberalism” post I put up earlier this week, Jonathan took issue with me for talking about freedom as having a legitimate role in the public sphere. He wants to reserve for freedom a special status that should not be degraded by association with more vulgar uses of the word especially as they are typically used in the political and economic spheres:
…freedom, if it means anything, is rare, difficult of achievement, and entirely inward. It is not to be confused with civil liberties, with economic justice, with political self-determination. . . The concepts it can usefully refer to are religious, philosophical, perhaps aesthetic. To encounter the word in any popular medium is to encounter it under a perverted, materialist form. I'm all about waging a struggle against what's described above as neoliberalism, or consumerism, but if I do so, freedom is not my battle-cry.
…There are, I admit, logical and ontological links between internal and external freedom. But the true nature of such connection depends on a proper understanding of what an external freedom can be. Civil liberties are not freedom. Moral relativism is not freedom. Anything, in fact, that incurs debt and obligation (such as the exercise of virtue, social life), or runs up against limit or constraint (the use of resources, economic life), is not freedom. Only the creative act is free, or say rather, is an imaging forth of freedom: because even creativity is not totally free, with us, but only with God. Worship, art, and some higher thought are the only forms (or images) of freedom available to us.
Yes. I'm with him in wanting to preserve for freedom this sacred interior quality, that it is the one capacity that makes humans humans as spiritual beings, and that without it we are just a talking sack of chemcals. But isn't there a way of speaking about freedom in the public sphere that avoids the degradation that he fears? Because we so often encounter the use of the word freedom in a degraded form in the public sphere, does that mean any discussion of its role there leads to a degradation of it?
If we define freedom negativelyas a state of liberation from compulsion, wouldn't that leave room for a broader discusson of its more positive or creative aspects? Sometimes the compulsion is a more interior experience and sometimes it is more exterior. You can argue that interior compulsions–obsession, addiction, delusional thinking–are more serious and destructive of the soul. But even if we think of freedom in this profoundly interior sense, Isn't it possible to think of political and economic arrangements that either promote or inhibit the exercise of it in the public sphere?
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Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.
In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise.
In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both domintate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.
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In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.
That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.
The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII period.
Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere, and it's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance, became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire–and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.
So that old lower-car 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but the conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.
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Thinking about what that space requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Feedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.
Since market choices are a part of our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century–to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an incredibly naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th century American mythos.
But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance leads to too much government, which led to the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or in the U.S.imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980.
The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector–the few making serfs of the many–are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector–the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology.
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The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that real freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms.
And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public spheres, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice.
Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power who freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a space for ordinary people to live freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.
Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. No matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other, as Frodo did on his long trek into Mordor, with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not.
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